Learning Lessons From Dot-Com Bubble

Dec. 23, 2012 1:42 p.m. ET

As a young graduate out of a management program in India, Prashant Kumar did what many upstarts did in the late '90s—started a dot-com company. The ending of that story, like so many others from the era, is easy to guess: It failed.

But for Mr. Kumar, chief executive for Asian markets excluding India, China, Japan and Australia at advertising agency Universal McCann, says the experience gave him crucial insight into the world of digital marketing.

ENLARGE

Prashant Kumar, head of Universal McCann in Asia.
Universal McCann

Describing himself as "a child of the dot-com era," Mr. Kumar says he has "complete conviction" in the social-media sphere, which has been central to his campaigns for brands including Coca-Cola, Chrysler, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson.

Mr. Kumar, now 36 years old and one of the youngest advertising executives in Asia, sat down with Shibani Mahtani in Singapore to discuss how his dot-com failure helped him refine his digital strategy, and his impressions of creative talent in Asia.

The following interview has been edited.

WSJ: How did you move from founding a dot-com company to advertising?

Mr. Kumar: I studied math in college, but I was highly active in the literary sphere. I actually wanted to be a journalist, but no one wanted to give me a job in journalism. I refused to be the regular corporate guy; I wanted to do something different in the corporate world. Advertising offered the perfect opportunity for that, because it exists at the cusp of business and people.

I was also fortunate, because when I finished business school, it was the dot-com revolution. I cut my teeth via a dot-com company that we founded in business school.

The dot-com was obviously not successful—we shut down the company—but the vision and the level of conviction in digital stuck.

WSJ: What do you do differently, considering your digital background?

Mr. Kumar: In most Asian markets, teenagers start their day with Facebook and end their day in Facebook—if you aren't on Facebook, you don't exist.

The content that you upload is your currency, and reputations are built and ruined on Facebook. It is a whole different world. But if you look at all the brands who focus on teenagers, you do not see their marketing as hybrid as it should be, they do not have an equal focus on the online and offline world.

Another example of how social can evolve for companies is the banking industry. There is no better way to validate trust, and hence the credit-worthiness of the person, than peer-to-peer networks.

In the old days, when you had to lend somebody some money, you'd ask people, "Can you trust this guy, will he give it back?" Why shouldn't the finance industry ride the peer-to-peer networks that exist in the social world? Social will transform a whole lot of categories like we have never known, we are at a very "tween" age for social but it is growing.

WSJ: What is especially interesting about working with Asian markets?

Mr. Kumar: On one hand, you have markets like Korea, which are some of the most advanced users of the mobile space.

And then you have Indonesia, one of the most prolific users of social media. And then relatively less developed mobile markets like Vietnam, which are developing very fast. Mobile has really helped all of Asia leapfrog some of the online evolution curves that the Western world went through.

Mobile marketing allows you a certain location awareness, which used to be the stuff of marketing utopia. It is exciting for Asian markets, yes, due to the diversity that exists but also for the industry as a whole.

WSJ: Is it difficult coming up with strategies that tailor to such a diverse range of countries?

Mr. Kumar: I do believe that there is a pan-Oriental strand of culture that runs across all these markets. I think it offers unique challenges, but ultimately the human experience and human needs are quite consistent. Expressions vary dramatically, but the core experience that you are creating can be consistent.

For instance, last year we did a campaign for Microsoft across Asia-Pacific which was built around Microsoft being the connective tissue between your loved ones. The emphasis was on family—something that is important across all of Asia. The expression of family bonding is different, so in Singapore we built it around the Chinese family reunion during Chinese New Year, with a big focus on the food; in India we built it around the occasion of Deepavali. We try to find the uniqueness of a market, but the highest common factor that can bring to life the beauty of a brand in a way that everyone can understand.

WSJ: There is so much information available to consumers, how do you come up with strategies to give consumers the information they need without overwhelming them?

Mr. Kumar: People are in control more and more, even for television, which is turning smart—what used to be a classical passive media now allows for more control and decision. We design our campaigns to be told as stories that people can enjoy and would like to pass along to friends.

The aim is to have content so likable that people pass it along for you, rather than you paying a media organization to pass it along for you.

WSJ: What is your vision for UM?

Mr. Kumar: Campaign-wise, I believe all marketing will be social—social is the natural way to be for us, for thousands of years. Mass media came, and became the guys with the loudspeakers, shouting about which brands are good and what you should buy. This went on for decades and decades, but with the advent of social media, influence is being democratized. Social media, then, should not be a thing that a company does but rather the thing that sits right at the heart of their business models.

WSJ: How do you see emerging markets in Southeast Asia, like Myanmar and Laos, which haven't been exposed to advertising and marketing like in the other regional markets, and markets like Indonesia, which have an enthusiastic consumer class?

Mr. Kumar: Myanmar is going to be the Vietnam of Asia in the next few years—or rather what Vietnam was like three years ago, a booming economy with similar population demographics, purchasing power and size. The evolution of the market will be much more accelerated than we have seen in the past. As we speak, I know half a dozen marketers who plan to visit Myanmar in the next few months, so I'd expect acceleration.

In the BRIC story, Indonesia often gets ignored, but if you look at the sheer growth rates, Indonesia has had a much more dramatic growth trajectory than India or China. Very soon it will be a trillion-dollar economy. Things are changing really fast, and you can feel the energy when you go there. Indonesia will be a pole economy for the entire Southeast Asian region, and we are very optimistic about the possibilities in Indonesia—it is already a top-five Facebook market. We are living in exciting times.

WSJ: Is it difficult finding creative talent in Asia?

Mr. Kumar: In the West, there is an unconstrained view of creativity. That wouldn't be true for Asia, because Asia has thousands of years of cultural experience. For good or bad, people are proud of their culture and they put more cultural constraints on themselves than would be normal in the West.

But I do not believe that Asians are any less creative than the West, that is a wrong and condescending notion.

I believe that Asians are much better attuned to thinking creatively within the framework, they are used to operating in multiple shades of gray. But many countries in Asia—say Vietnam or Indonesia—are in the early years when it comes to the advertising industry, so the raw creative talent that exists needs to be honed, developed and polished.

But even if you look at international awards, the level of creativity that Thailand or Japan shows is no different from how it is in the West.

Résumé

Education: B.A. in mathematics, St. Stephen's College at Delhi University (1997), postgraduate management diploma in communications (marketing) at Mudra Institute of Communications (1999), Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School (2011)

Career: Formerly media manager for the Starcom Mediavest Group India, and group head for strategic resources, Carat Asia Pacific; joined Universal McCann in 2003 as general manager of Malaysia, appointed as chief executive for Asian markets (excluding India, China, Japan and Australia) in 2008.

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